The processing power, memory capacity, network connectivity and bandwidth, available disk space, and other resources available to processing systems have increased exponentially in recent decades. These resources have for many years been powerful enough to allow a single physical server to host many instances of virtual machines (VMs) and virtualized functions (VFs). These advances had led to the extensive provisioning of a wide spectrum of functionality into specific pockets of concentrated physical processing resources that may be located virtually anywhere, i.e., in the cloud. A more recent development is serverless execution frameworks that eliminate the need for statically provisioned servers and instead provision and execute functions dynamically, e.g., in response to pre-defined triggers. Improvements in serverless execution frameworks will drive the further development and implementation of flexible functionality into the cloud.